The Funhouse

by Dean Koontz

  * * *

  That night, at six-thirty, Buzz Klemmet picked up Amy at the Harper house. He was a ruggedly handsome guy with a lot of hair, muscles, a cocky attitude, and a carefully cultivated tough-guy image. Mama had met him once, the second night he'd come for Amy, and she hadn't liked him one bit. In keeping with her statement that she no longer cared what happened to Amy, Mama hadn't said a word for or against Buzz, but Amy could see the loathing in her mother's eyes. Tonight, Mama stayed in the kitchen and didn't even bother to come out to glare at Buzz.

  Richie and Liz were already in the backseat of Buzz's vintage GTO convertible. The roof was down, and as soon as Buzz and Amy got in, Richie said, “Hey, put the top up so we can pass a joint around on the way to the fairgrounds without everyone seeing us.”

  “Good old Royal City, Ohio,” Liz said. “Still frozen in the Middle Ages. Would you believe there are some places in this country where you can smoke grass right out in the open without getting thrown in jail?”

  Buzz put up the top, but he said, “Hold the joint until after we've stopped for gas.”

  Half a mile from the Harper house, they stopped at a Union 76 station. Buzz got out to check the oil, and Richie got out to pump the gas.

  As soon as Liz and Amy were alone in the car, Liz leaned forward from the backseat and said, “Buzz thinks you're the hottest thing he's ever seen.

  Oh, sure,” Amy said.

  “No, he really does.”

  “He tell you that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We haven't done anything,” Amy said.

  “That's one reason he thinks you're so hot. He's such a dreamboat that he's used to girls just falling on their backs for him. But you tease him along, let him feel a little, and then stop him right on the brink. He's not used to that. It's different for him. He's got the idea that when you finally give in you'll be absolutely wild.”

  “If I give in,” Amy said.

  “You'll give in,” Liz said confidently. “You still don't want to admit it, but you're just like me.”

  “Maybe.

  “You've been dating him every night for a week, and each night you let him get a little farther than the night before,” Liz said. “You're coming out of your shell an inch at a time.”

  “Buzz told you exactly how far I've let him go?” Amy asked.

  “Yep,” Liz said, grinning.

  “Jeez,” Amy said. “He's got such class.”

  “Oh, hell,” Liz said, “he wasn't tattling on you. It's not like he told a stranger. I'm your best friend. And Buzz and I go way, way back. I used to screw around with him, and we're still the best of buddies. Listen, kid, when we leave the carnival tonight, let's go back to my house. My folks are still away. You and Buzz can use their bedroom. Stop teasing the guy. Give him a break. Give yourself a break. You want the old salami just as much as I do.”

  Buzz and Richie got back in the car, and Richie fired up a joint. While Buzz drove to the fairgrounds, they passed around the dope, and each of them took a couple of deep drags, holding the smoke in their lungs as long as they could. In the parking lot at the fairgrounds, they lit another joint and sat in the car until they had done that one, too.

  By the time they reached the ticket booth, Amy was feeling warm, airy, and a bit giggly. As she drifted onto the carnival lot, into that roar of sound and whirlpool of motion, she had the peculiar feeling that tonight was going to be one of the most important nights of her life. Tonight she would make decisions about herself, tonight she would either accept the role in life that both Liz and Mama believed she was suited for, or she would make up her mind to be the good, responsible person that she had always wanted to be. She was standing on a thin line, and it was time to jump one way or the other, time to make up her mind about herself. She didn't know how she knew that, but she did know it. The feeling was unshakable. At first it sobered her and made her a little bit afraid, but then Liz made a very funny crack about a fat woman who was walking up the midway in front of them, and Amy laughed, and the grass had its effect, and the laugh turned into an uncontrollable giggle, and she was floating again.

  PART THREE

  The Funhouse

  12

  AMY DISCOVERED that Liz was right about a little grass making the thrill rides even more fun than usual. They rode the Octopus, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Dive Bomber, the Whip, the Loop-de-Loop, the Colossus, and others. The ramps seemed higher than those on thrill rides that Amy had ridden in - previous carnivals, the dips seemed deeper, the whipping action, the spinning, soaring, diving, twisting, and turning all seemed wilder and faster than ever before. Amy held onto Buzz and screamed with delight and with a quiver of genuine terror as well. Buzz pulled her close, he used her fear and the sudden lurchings of the rides as excuses to cop some quick, cheap feels. Like Liz, Amy was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, but no bra. Buzz couldn't resist touching her breasts and her long, bare, nicely tanned legs. Each time she got off a ride, Amy was disoriented for a minute or two and had to cling to Buzz, and he liked that, and she liked it, too, because Buzz had such big, hard, muscular arms and shoulders.

  Only forty minutes after they arrived at the fairgrounds, they slipped off the midway, between a couple of sideshows, to the back lot, where rows of carnival trucks were parked. They went around behind the trucks, into a deserted cul-de-sac that ended at the fairgrounds' ivy-covered fence. They stood in shadow-dappled, summer-evening sunlight and passed around a third joint that Liz took out of her purse, they sucked in the sweet smoke, held it down as long as they possibly could, then let it out with urgent gasps of pleasure.

  “This one's a little different,” Richie said as the hand-rolled cigarette made its second circle around their huddle.

  “This one what?” Amy asked.

  “This joint,” Richie said.

  “Yeah,” Liz said. “It's spiced up.”

  “With what?” Buzz asked.

  “Trust me.”

  “Angel dust?” Richie asked.

  “Trust me,” Liz said.

  “Hey,” Buzz said, “I'm not sure I like smoking something that I don't know what it is.”

  “Trust me,” Liz said.

  “I trust you about as far as I can throw you,” Buzz said.

  “Doesn't matter,” Liz said. “We've almost finished the joint anyway.”

  Buzz was holding the stub. He hesitated, then said, “Oh, hell, why not live dangerously.” He took one last drag on it.

  Richie started to kiss Liz on the neck, and Buzz kissed Amy, and without quite realizing how it happened, Amy found herself pinned against the side of one of the trucks, and Buzz was running his hands up and down her body, kissing her hard, pushing his tongue into her mouth, and then he tugged her T-shirt out of her shorts and got one hand under it and squeezed her bare breasts, thumbed her nipples, and she moaned softly, concerned that someone might walk around behind the trucks and see them, but unable to express her concern, responding even to Buzz's crude caresses.

  Suddenly Liz said, “Enough, you guys. Save it for later. I'm sure as hell not going to lie down right here, in broad daylight, and take it in the dirt.”

  “The dirt is the best place,” Richie said.

  “Yeah,” Buzz said. “Let's do it in the dirt.”

  “It's the natural thing,” Richie said.

  “Yeah,” Buzz said.

  “All the animals do it in the dirt,” Richie said.

  “Yeah,” Buzz said. “Let's be natural, just hang loose and be real natural.”

  “Stifle yourselves,” Liz said. “There's a lot more carnival to see. Come on. Let's go.”

  Amy tucked in her T-shirt, and Buzz gave her one more wet kiss.

  Back on the midway, Amy thought the rides seemed to be spinning faster than before. All the colors were more vivid, too. The dozens of different sources of music seemed louder than they had been ten minutes ago, and each song possessed a subtleness of melody of which she hadn't been previously aware.

  I'm not
totally in control of myself, Amy thought worriedly, dizzily. I'm not out of control yet, but I'm liable to wind up that way. I've got to be careful. Sensible. Watch out for that dope. That damned, spiced-up dope. If I don't watch myself, I'm going to end up in a bedroom at Liz's house, with Buzz on top of me, whether that's what I really want or not. And I don't think that's what I want. I don't want to be the kind of person Liz and Mama say I am. I don't. Do I?

  They rode the Loop-de-Loop again.

  Amy clung to Buzz.

  * * *

  After spending Monday morning and part of the afternoon at the fairgrounds, watching the carnies set up their equipment, Joey hadn't intended to return to the carnival until Saturday night, when he would run away forever. But Monday evening he changed his mind.

  Actually, his mother changed it for him.

  He was sitting in the family room, watching television, drinking Pepsi, when he accidentally knocked over his glass. The soda splashed on his chair and spilled all over the carpet. He got a bunch of paper towels from the kitchen and cleaned up the mess as best he could, and he was sure that he hadn't permanently stained either the carpet or the chair's upholstery.

  In spite of the fact that the damage wasn't serious, Mama was furious when she walked in and saw him with handfuls of Pepsi-soaked paper towels. Although it was only seven-thirty, she was half drunk already. She grabbed him and shook him and told him that he behaved like a little animal, and she sent him to bed more than two hours early.

  He felt miserable. He couldn't even turn to Amy for sympathy because she was out somewhere, on another date with Buzz. Joey didn't know where she and Buzz had gone, and even if he did he v couldn't run after her, whimpering about how Mama had shaken and scared him.

  In his room Joey sprawled on the bed for a while, crying, utterly disconsolate, angered by the injustice of it all—and then he thought of the two pink passes that the carny had given him earlier in the day. Two passes. He would use one to get into the fairgrounds on Saturday evening, when he would try to join up with the carnies by telling them that he was an orphan and had nowhere else to go. But that left one pass, and if he didn't use it between now and Saturday, it would only go to waste.

  He sat up on the edge of the bed and thought about it for a few minutes, and he decided that he could sneak off to the carnival, have a lot of fun, and sneak back into the house without his mother knowing that he'd been gone. He got up and pulled the drapes shut, so that hardly any of the fading, summer-evening sunlight reached into the room. He took a spare blanket and an extra pillow from his closet and used those to form a dummy under the covers. He switched on his dim night-light, stepped back from the bed, and studied his handiwork critically. Even with the splinters of light showing at the edges of the drapes, he thought the dummy would pass Mama's inspection. Usually she didn't come to his room until eleven o'clock at the very earliest, and if she waited that long tonight, until well after dark, when the room would be illuminated by only the night-light, the trick would surely work, she would be fooled by the dummy.

  The hard part was going to be getting out of the house without drawing her attention. He took a few dollar bills from his thirty-two-dollar kitty and tucked the money into a pocket of his jeans. He also pocketed one of the carnival passes and stuck the other one under the glass-jar bank that stood on his desk. He carefully opened his bedroom door, looked both ways along the upstairs hall, stepped out of the room, and closed the door behind him. He crept to the stairs and began the long, tense journey down toward the first floor.

  * * *

  Amy, Liz, Buzz, and Richie stopped in front of a sideshow that advertised a magician called Marco the Magnificent. The come-on was a large poster that showed a screaming woman being decapitated by a guillotine, while a grinning magician stood with his hand on the executioner's lever.

  “I love magicians,” Amy said.

  “I love anyone I can get my hands on,” Liz said, giggling.

  My Uncle Arnold used to be a stage magician,” Richie said, pushing his glasses up on his nose to take a closer look at Marco's lurid poster.

  “Did he make stuff disappear and everything?” Buzz asked.

  Liz said, “He was so bad that he made audiences disappear.”

  Amy was giddy from the spiced-up pot that she had smoked, and Liz's little joke seemed hysterically funny. She laughed, and her laughter infected the others.

  “No, now, really, honestly,” Buzz said when they finally got control of themselves. “Did your Uncle Arnold make his living that way? It wasn't just a hobby or something”

  “No hobby,” Richie said. “Uncle Arnold was the real thing. He called himself the Amazing Arnoldo. But I guess he didn't make much of a living at it, and he got to hate it after a while. He's been selling insurance for the past twenty years.”

  “I think being a magician would be neat,” Amy said. “Why did your uncle hate it?”

  “Well,” Richie said, “every successful magician has to have a trick that's all his own, a special illusion that makes him stand out in a crowd of other magicians. Uncle Arnold had this gimmick where he made twelve white doves appear, one after the other, out of thin air, in bursts of flame. The audience would applaud politely when the first dove appeared, and then they'd gasp when the second and third ones popped up, and by the time half a dozen birds had materialized, the audience was cheering. When the entire dozen had been brought out of their hiding places in my uncle's clothes, each presented in a little puff of fire, you can imagine the ovation the audience gave him.”

  “I don't understand,” Buzz said, frowning.

  “Yeah,” Amy said. “If your uncle was so great, why'd he quit and start selling insurance?”

  “Sometimes,” Richie said, “not often, but about once in every thirty or forty performances, one of the doves would catch fire and burn up alive, right there on stage. It hummed out the audience, and they booed Uncle Arnold.”

  Liz laughed, and Amy laughed, too, and Liz did an imitation of a burning dove trying to slap the flames off its wings, and Amy knew that it wasn't really funny, knew that it was a horrible thing to happen to the poor birds, and she knew she shouldn't laugh, but she couldn't help herself, because it seemed like the most hilarious story she had ever heard.

  “It wasn't very funny to Uncle Arnold,” Richie said between whoops of laughter. “Like I said, it didn't happen often, but he never knew when it was going to happen, so he was always tense. The tension gave him an ulcer. And even when the birds didn't burn up, they shit in his suit pockets.”

  They all laughed again, with renewed vigor, holding onto each other. People passing them on the midway gave them strange looks, which only made them laugh even harder.

  Richie treated everyone to tickets for Marco's next show.

  The ground inside the magician's tent was covered with sawdust, and the air was musty. Brightly colored plastic flags and posters of Marco decorated the dimly lighted, canvas-walled space.

  Amy, Liz, Buzz, and Richie joined two dozen spectators who were crowded around a small, raised stage at one end of the tent.

  A moment later Marco appeared in a cloud of blue smoke, taking a bow as a tape-recorded fanfare filled the room. It was painfully obvious that he had merely stepped through a slit in the rear wall of the tent, using the smoke for cover. In fact he hadn't even stepped onto the stage, he had stumbled.

  Liz glanced at Amy. They both giggled.

  “Thank God he's a magician and not a tightrope walker,” Richie whispered.

  Amy felt as if she were standing on balloons, balancing precariously, about to perform some splendid magic act of her own.

  What had Liz added to that joint?

  Marco's appearance was as pathetic as his entrance. He was a middle-aged man with bloodshot eyes, and he was heavily made up to resemble the Devil. His lips were red, his face was frost-pale, his eyes were outlined with thick black mascara, and his widow's peak was also accentuated with mascara. He wore a shabby tuxedo and a
pair of white gloves that were marred by several large yellow stains.

  “He shouldn't wear those gloves when he jerks off,” Liz whispered.

  They all laughed.

  “Gross,” Richie said.

  “He looks gross enough to do it,” Buzz whispered.

  Marco glanced nervously at them, unable to hear what they were saying. He smiled at them and doffed his top hat in a feeble attempt to win their silent attention.

  “Whatever you do,” Liz told the others, “for God's sake don't let him shake hands with you.”

  They all laughed again.

  A few of the other spectators were glancing at Amy, some just curious, some disapproving, but she didn't care what they thought. She was having so much fun.

  Marco decided to ignore them, and he picked up a deck of cards that was on the small table in the center of the stage. He shuffled the cards and wrapped them in a silk handkerchief, with only one edge of the deck exposed. He placed that bundle in a clear glass goblet, every movement performed with a flourish. When he stepped back and pointed at the goblet, cards began to rise individually from the silk-swathed deck: first the ace of diamonds . . . then the ace of clubs . . . the ace of hearts . . . and finally, mistakenly, the jack of diamonds. Marco looked embarrassed, quickly swept the cards away, and went on to his next trick.

  “Boy, does he stink,” Buzz said softly.

  “It's those gloves you smell,” Liz said.

  “Richie, is this guy really your Uncle Arnold?” Amy asked.

  Marco blew up a balloon and knotted it. When he touched a burning cigarette to the balloon, the sphere popped noisily, and a live dove appeared in the heart of the explosion. It was a better illuion than the card trick, but Amy still saw the bird dart out from beneath the magician's tuxedo jacket.

  Marco performed two more tricks that drew only half-hearted applause from the audience, and then Liz said, “Are you guys about ready to 8put?”